HOW I spent many weeks looking for a job and failed to find one is a sorry tale, similar in pattern to a thousand others of the same genre. When I got back to Prague I had just enough money in my pocket to buy one suit of civilian clothes, a pair of shoes and a hat. Mother had my old shirts pressed and ready for me. I turned in my state-issued uniform, and after it was gone I felt bare. It was like walking down a crowded street in a dream without any clothes, wondering when other people would begin to notice that I was naked.

I had no profession except soldiering. I discovered that I had forgotten everything I had ever learned in school. Occasionally I would be filled with a terror of poverty, because I knew what it meant. But I had one thing now I had never possessed before: proof that I could get what I wanted if I were prepared to work hard enough for it. The war, and the Officers’ Training School in Vienna, had given me that.

I went first to the factory in Smichov where I had worked before the war to see if I could get back my old job as bookkeeper. They had no use for my services because the business was in a bad way; most of their properties had been in Germany and Austria. I sought out a few school acquaintances and found them singularly unable to recall my name. Eisenstein had been killed in the second year of the war. Sometimes I was asked if I had been wounded and I learned to say no, hiding the scar on my throat with a scarf because one employment manager had informed me they could use only men who had received no wounds in the war.

Must I always start from the beginning, I thought, each time over again, never able to advance step by step like other people? Yet I was never really despondent and certainly not unhappy for long after each refusal. I was learning to see Prague with new eyes as I walked over the face of the city looking for my own place within it. And seeing it new, I was learning to love it more.

Before the war this had been a subject city, a provincial town, and because it counted for little in the world of power as Berlin and Vienna counted, its crowds had been second-rate crowds and their movements secondary movements and their thoughts important only to themselves. Now there was a new expression on the faces of the people I passed on the streets. The whole city was growing like a wheat field in the sun.

Officers in French uniforms from the military missions swaggered along with sophisticated, beautifully dressed women on their arms; thousands of French, Italian and Russian Legionnaires wearing strings of war decorations found anything in the city theirs for the asking. There were even countless Germans on the streets now. After going underground in 1918 and 1919, they had come into the open again, finding no disposition among the people to persecute them. They were merely ignored. And everywhere there were gay, busy Czechs who knew rising prosperity for the first time in their lives.

Whenever a crowd gathered to watch a street incident or wait for a gate to open, I joined it. I wanted to be with people who knew what they wanted and where they were going. It was some time before I realized that the individual minds of the people in these crowds were not so very different from my own. Their faces were often impassive, giving no thoughts away, but hundreds of thousands of violent war images must be masked behind each one. It was their jobs and their professions which formed a protective film between their memories and their daily work. When I had a job it would be the same with me.

Yet there was more purpose in these crowds than merely a million individuals earning their food and beds. As I walked out the soles of my new shoes that autumn, the meaning of these changes I saw in Prague gradually wore their way into my mind like rain eating into a thatched roof. My birthplace was making itself over as quickly as possible in the likeness of an ideal which had lain buried in its subconscious for nearly three hundred years—the freedom to be itself.

Proudly, and at the same time simply, Czechs were showing forth their old treasured traditions. National costumes had always been frowned upon by the empire except on certain holidays; now they appeared everywhere on the streets in splendid handwork and color. Nor did it seem that my people were going to be content merely with their traditional past. Side by side with the beautiful old baroque buildings, new structures which belonged to the twentieth century were going up. In the solar plexus of Europe, new techniques were being used with a long view toward the future. Old bureaucratic buildings had been turned to new uses, and the modern structures were rising with clean, metallic designs.

Even quite small things gave evidence that we now belonged to ourselves. Every German place name had been changed. There were new automatic public telephones on street corners and the mailboxes had been painted sky blue and decorated with the scarlet Bohemian lion rampant with its flying double tail. Sometimes I saw people on the street look at them and smile inwardly. Parks and restaurants and thoroughfares had been cleansed of the trappings of Austrian and Hungarian nobility. For the first time in three hundred years the solid, forthright Czechs were enjoying their own ancient and beautiful city. Up on the steep streets of the Malá Strana a thin old man with a white beard and a wide-brimmed black hat took daily walks in a firm, elastic step from the castle, adding a kindly smile to his nod whenever he was recognized as Thomas Masaryk, the founder and president of the republic. Secret service men who followed him found their assignment difficult because he steadfastly refused to consider himself a being apart from his own people. It was encouraging to remember that he was the son of a coachman.

That year the summer had been good, as though even nature were helping to erase the sour coldness of the war. The autumn sun warmed the valley of the Vltava, while night frosts changed the green of the parks and gardens to rich reds and gold. I sauntered in the parks and moved indolently with the crowds, thoroughly relaxed at last. I knew something was waiting for me, some work that needed me alone to complete it, a place of my own in the larger whole, and before long I would find it. In the meantime, I had no doubt that it was wonderful simply to be alive.

One afternoon I found myself standing in front of the Associated Bank where my uncle had begun his career. In the old days I had always avoided the building when I could, for it seemed to me to bear a marked resemblance to Uncle’s high-brushed hair and small eyes. I was also convinced that it was working in a bank which had changed Uncle from a man who could conceivably be Mother’s brother into the person I had known in Berlin. I looked up at the windows that stared with blank eyes on passing traffic. Over them, below the third level, was a row of window boxes full of small shrubs and vines. On either side of the main entrance stood boxwood trees in tubs, their foliage clipped in the shape of globes.

Without meditating on my reasons, I walked between the two tubs to the great metal door and tugged at my coat to smooth it over my hips before I passed through. Inside, the bank was dark and impressive with patrician gentility, like a club for wealthy old men who refused to recognize a new, modern world. Since it was the second largest bank in the republic, it could afford to be a trifle shabby at the seams. Serious, solid, ancient business was its only interest; new and perhaps unstable money it had no wish to attract.

Mahogany tables and counters returned no warmth to the touch of hands, and the frosted-glass partitions which separated tellers from each other encouraged privacy and discretion. The clients who were transacting business at that moment appeared to have reason to be ashamed of themselves, as clients in banks so often do, while the tellers and assistant managers wore expressions which signified that they were on the correct side of the mahogany barricades which separated them from the public.

The doorman was watching me closely. I stretched my neck inside my stiff collar and tried to appear at ease. “I’d like to see your personnel head,” I said.

The man stared at me insolently, but when he spoke he used the customary tones of smooth respect befitting his job. “Do you have an appointment?”

I remembered that I had been an officer. “No. But I think he’ll see me. Where can I find him?” I shifted my glance to the large clock on the opposite wall, as though I had no time to waste.

“Up those stairs,” he said. “To the right.”

When I reached the landing on the second floor I discovered that the hall branched in two directions. Which one should I take? There was no one to ask. Had the doorman said the stairs on the right, or right after I went up the stairs? I took the hall in the direction he had indicated, and after turning a corner I found myself in a large reception room. There were high windows and a high, crenelated ceiling, and Persian carpets on the floor. Chairs with high backs upholstered in green leather were set at angles around the walls, and I noticed that on the back of each one the insignia of the bank had been pressed into the leather.

The room was as quiet and almost as shabby with gentility as a church. Over the mantel of a black marble fireplace hung a copy of a renaissance painting that I took to be Italian. It was flanked by photographs of bearded gentlemen in gilt frames, probably former presidents of the bank. On the far side of the room a walnut-paneled door stood slightly ajar but no sounds issued from behind it. For perhaps three or four minutes I stood there, arms hanging at my sides and my shoulders straight, wondering if I should sit down but deciding not to take a chance.

A man came through from the room beyond the open door and moved to within a few feet of me before he discovered that he was not alone. He was wearing gray striped trousers, a black morning coat and a black tie. Distinguished, I thought, but discreet. He frowned when he saw me and then his face grew bland. “Can I do anything for you?” he said.

“Are you the personnel manager? I’d like to inquire about a job in the bank.”

He frowned again. “You’re in the wrong part of the building. This is the board of directors’ wing.”

“I’m sorry, but could you help me anyway?” I said.

He leafed through the papers he held in his hand. “You’d better go back the way you came,” he said, not looking at me. “And turn left on the first landing. You’ll find the personnel director in the first office on the right.”

When I thanked him he smiled, but not easily. As I retraced my steps and followed his directions I turned over in my mind a new idea forming in it, to the effect that working in a bank might not be so bad as I had always thought. From my intimate knowledge and admiration for the works of Charles Dickens I had expected to find in any bank a smell of money-changers and musty bookkeepers with damp palms. The remote air of refinement I had met instead was a challenge.

The personnel director asked me innumerable questions with regard to my background. I answered them honestly, but I carefully refrained from giving him Uncle’s name. He said there might be an opening later, but I would have to pass an examination required of all bank employees, based on commercial knowledge, before I could be considered. In five weeks one such examination would be given, open to any graduate of the Commercial Academy. He gave me no encouragement and I left with the date and place of the examination written on a piece of paper which I stuffed into my pocket.

After that I gave up looking for any other job. Nothing at all remained in my head from the years of work at the academy, but Mother had kept all my books and now I brought them out again. Systematically I began to go through them. They were filled with material that had once seemed dreary and much too complicated, but now I found it entering my mind logically and easily, as though I were reading and understanding what I read with a new brain. When I was told two days after the examination that I had passed with one of the highest marks, I was pleased but not surprised. The Associated Bank indicated its willingness to consider my application now, for undefined work at a salary of eight hundred crowns a month.

I had found a place for myself at last. Maybe not the right one, but at least a beginning. The first day I rode to the bank on the streetcar from Smichov I met a fellow who had once sat next to me in the nonclassical school in Malá Strana. After talking with him casually for five minutes I discovered that he, too, was an employee of the Associated Bank.

“What are you doing now?” he said, without much interest.

I waited a moment in order to enjoy the sensation of having a job to talk about. “I’m at the Associated Bank, too,” I said. “Matter of fact, this is my first day there.”

He showed more than a little surprise. “What department you going to be in?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

“What makes you think you’ve got a choice?”

I shrugged and he went on, “Where would you work if you had anything to say about it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Not bookkeeping or accounting, certainly. I prefer to deal with people. Secretary, perhaps. Secretary to the board of directors, maybe.”

He began to laugh and he kept on laughing for quite awhile. Then he said, “Wait till I tell that to the other chaps. I suppose you know there are only three secretaries in the whole bank, and only one for the board. And that’s want you think you want to be!”

He went on to laugh some more, and after awhile we reached the bank and he went to his desk in the bookkeeping department and I reported to the personnel director. He explained that there was usually an opening in the accounting department; that was where they had thought to put me because the heaviest turnover of personnel always occurred there. Good accountants were difficult to find, and to keep. From my record in the examinations he was sure I would be most useful to the bank in that department, but at the moment there was no opening. He had expected one about now, but it hadn’t turned out that way.

Was this sad-looking man trying to say that someone had changed his mind and there was no opening for me in the bank after all? I must keep him from saying it. When he took a breath to sigh I interrupted. “Perhaps it’s the bank’s good fortune as well as mine,” I said, “that I have other qualities besides an aptitude with figures. I can also handle people. I was an officer in the army. And I’m quite willing to show you how well I can meet the public if you’ll give me an opportunity.” My ears told me I was sounding stiff and unnatural but I didn’t care. What had banks to do with naturalness?

He looked at me closely and his glasses glinted in the light from the high window. I waited motionless beside his desk. His telephone rang, he answered it shortly, and then he turned back to look at me again. Finally he sighed, gathered up a few papers from his desk and said, “Come with me.”

He led the way downstairs and through a door that opened into one of the mahogany and frosted-glass cages inhabited by the tellers. Banking hours had begun and there was the muffled sound of footsteps as clients came and went through the large front doors. There was also the persistent swish of paper, pages turning in ledgers and bank notes being counted, modulated by the clink of coins. I was introduced to the head cashier and his assistant. I heard the personnel director tell them I was a new man on trial: my duties would involve carrying messages for them both, entering their accounts in ledgers and relieving them in turn in the cages during the lunch hour. As we stood there in the middle of the morning, I was the only one who showed no surprise.

The work I was given to do was not difficult and I had no fear of falling down in what was expected of me. The only thing I was afraid of was the possibility of being sent to the accounting department as soon as a vacancy occurred there. I tried to think of every possible way to prevent it.

The head cashier was a wonderful old gentleman whom I admired profoundly. He had worked in the bank most of his life and yet he had managed to retain a remarkable sense of humor which amplified his old-world mannerisms of courtesy and human understanding. He was in charge of incoming cash, and he taught me in a few hours how to perform the duties expected of me. He also taught me by inference the subtle art of handling customers in such a way that both customer and cashier parted after a business transaction feeling warmed by the encounter.

The old man’s assistant in the next cage was a much younger fellow who had served throughout the war in the Kaiserjäger Regiment in the Tyrol. He found it impossible to forget the army. He was in charge of outgoing cash, and all his work was done with the precision of a military drill. When the customers left his window they must have felt as though they had been subjected to an order from a superior officer. He hated the head cashier with passion and made no attempt to conceal his feelings. When I was called to his cage to get a message or transfer some cash he plied me with questions about my military experiences. When I went to the cage of the old man I found myself talking of people and the oddities of human nature.

So I shuttled back and forth between two worlds, trying to maintain an equilibrium and showing neither of the men where my sympathies rested between them. Each was apparently satisfied with my work, and that was what I wanted.

I soon found that the clerks in the bookkeeping and accounting departments had to stay in the bank and work many hours after I was free at two o’clock. I fell into the habit of returning to the bank after I had eaten lunch at home to volunteer my help, especially in the accounting department. There was nothing disinterested in the action. I knew precisely why I was doing it.

There was higher overtime pay, for one thing. Whenever I stayed until midnight the increase in my pay check at the end of the week was appreciable. But the most urgent reason was beyond the need of money. All through the war I had volunteered for patrols whenever I was too restive in the lines. I had also volunteered as a measure of meeting trouble before it could reach me. If I volunteered for a patrol, I was spared the constant fear of being called upon when I didn’t want to go. So it was with my work in the accounting department. I believed with the force of a superstition that if I volunteered my services when they were needed, I wouldn’t be sent there for permanent work.

After a time my voluntary help became noticed in far corners of the organization. Perhaps what I did would not have seemed remarkable to the directors if there had not been so many young men in all the various departments of the bank who looked upon their work as something in the nature of a joke. They were the sons of important commercial families, whose custom it was to prepare their offspring for careers in the family business by first having them trained in a bank.

There were any number of these scions of industry in the Associated Bank. They moved aimlessly about in the foreign exchange department, the securities department, and the banking division, helping to give the bank an appearance of gracious courtesy in its dealings with clients, at the same time keeping the industrial plants of their parents firmly rooted to the capital investment of this particular banking house. The actual amount of work they managed to do was negligible, but no one seemed to expect them to do more.

So my own deliberately hard work became a matter of comment. Having once drawn attention to myself, further events added weight like wet snow accumulating on a snowball being pushed uphill, and chance was given a good deal of assistance by my determination to make no mistakes. Others could afford to be careless, but I have never believed it was a privilege in which I might indulge.

Late one morning as I returned to the cage of the assistant cashier with bank notes from the vault, I saw a familiar face leaning over my ledger at the high desk in the space behind the cages. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing there. The cashier explained to me under his breath that he was the manager of the banking department, making his usual inspection. I could hardly believe my ears. When I had known him, he was a professor in the Commercial Academy. Of all my teachers in all the schools I had attended, this one man had shown me the most active dislike. Before the entire class, shortly before graduation, he had predicted that I would end on the gallows because I was good for nothing else.

I watched him as he went through my cashbook, page by page, studying the figures intently. After awhile he turned, and when he caught my eye I knew he had been aware that he was looking at the work of a former pupil. He came toward the cage with a wide smile lighting his face. “Those figures are as perfect as lines of men on a parade ground,” he said, so that everyone back in the cages could hear him. “Perfect. Never saw anything neater. But I’m not surprised.” He put his hand through the open window of the cage and laid his arm across my shoulders. “This fellow was one of my most promising students. I’m proud to see such results from my teaching.” He gave my shoulder a pat and went back upstairs to the directors’ wing.

I don’t remember how long it was after that before the next chance came my way. I happened to be counting a huge package of bank notes received from Vienna that morning, as I did every day. They were notes of our own currency returned to us by foreign banks for exchange. Suddenly my finger stopped fluttering their corners as I counted. I went back four notes to touch them again. Then I took out two and examined them closely, without knowing why I did so. I started to put them back in the stack and go on with my work, but something made me stop. I extracted the two notes and took them to the head cashier, but he saw nothing wrong with them. They were like all other 500-crown notes on our bank. However, because he was a kindly man and I was persistent, he went with me to the manager of our department.

We were received in his handsomely furnished office and after a deal of consultation and expert examination, the notes were sent by special messenger to the National Bank. Word came back at once that they were both forgeries. Later the European market was flooded with them, but these were the first to be found in Prague.

I went back to my work between the two cages, but up in the directors’ wing they knew now who I was. I had been in the bank seven months. I had bought a new suit, and the year 1921 was nearly over. Chance had to combine with my determination once more before the next opportunity to go forward came my way.